Estratégias baseadas em aprendizado para coordenação de uma frota de robôs em tarefas cooperativas

In multi-robot systems, both control architecture and work strategy represent a challenge for researchers. It is important to have a robust architecture that can be easily adapted to requirement changes. It is also important that work strategy allows robots to complete tasks efficiently, considering that robots interact directly in environments with humans. In this context, this work explores two approaches for robot soccer team coordination for cooperative tasks development. Both approaches are based on a combination of imitation learning and reinforcement learning. Thus, in the first approach was developed a control architecture, a fuzzy inference engine for recognizing situations in robot soccer games, a software for narration of robot soccer games based on the inference engine and the implementation of learning by imitation from observation and analysis of others robotic teams. Moreover, state abstraction was efficiently implemented in reinforcement learning applied to the robot soccer standard problem. Finally, reinforcement learning was implemented in a form where actions are explored only in some states (for example, states where an specialist robot system used them) differently to the traditional form, where actions have to be tested in all states. In the second approach reinforcement learning was implemented with function approximation, for which an algorithm called RBF-Sarsa($lambda$) was created. In both approaches batch reinforcement learning algorithms were implemented and imitation learning was used as a seed for reinforcement learning. Moreover, learning from robotic teams controlled by humans was explored. The proposal in this work had revealed efficient in the robot soccer standard problem and, when implemented in other robotics systems, they will allow that these robotics systems can efficiently and effectively develop assigned tasks. These approaches will give high adaptation capabilities to requirements and environment changes.

A survey of control architectures for autonomous mobile robots

MEDEIROS, Adelardo A. D.A survey of control architectures for autonomous mobile robots. J. Braz. Comp. Soc., Campinas, v. 4, n. 3, abr. 1998 .Disponível em: Acesso: 27 set. 2010.

A Versao 2006 da Equipe POTI de Futebol de Robos o

Auciomar C. T. Cerqueira;Filipe C. A. Lins ; Adelardo A. D. Medeiros ; Pablo J. Alsina1. A versao 2006 da Equipe POTI de futebol de robos. In: CONGRESSO BRASILEIRO DE AUTOMÁTICA,2. Campo Grande, RS, 2006. Anais... Campo Grande: JRI, 2006.

Representation of odometry errors on occupancy grids

SOUZA, Anderson A. S. ; SANTANA, André M. ; BRITTO, Ricardo S. ; GONÇALVES, Luiz Marcos G. ; MEDEIROS, Adelardo A. D. Representation of Odometry Errors on Occupancy Grids. In: INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON INFORMATICS IN CONTROL, AUTOMATION AND ROBOTICS, 5., 2008, Funchal, Portugal. Proceedings... Funchal, Portugal: ICINCO, 2008.

A prática de atividade física de crianças e adolescentes com e sem epilepsia

The epilepsy is one of the neurological disorders more common in the pediatric period, and which interferes significantly in the psycho and social life of children and teenagers. The objective of this study was analyzing the practice of sedentary practices, physicals, traditional infant fun and games of children and teenagers with and without epilepsy. The study was prospective, transversal descriptive, done with 60 children and teenagers with epilepsy (Epileptic Group - EG) patients from Pediatric Neurology Clinic of the Centre Integrated Health Lineu Araújo and 60 children and teenagers without epilepsy (Control Group - CG) students from municipal public school, both of the two groups paired with the same age (age group 7 to 14 years) of both the genders (female = 25/41,6% and male = 35/58,3%) of the Teresina city Piauí. It was done two pattern questionnaires, one applied to children and teenagers of the EG and CG to identify the sedentary activities, physical and traditional infant games and other to the parents/responsible of the EG about the clinical and demographic information. The results permitted the elaboration of two manuscripts: a) the first one titled The Practice of Sedentary and Physical Activities of Children and Teenagers with Epilepsy which showed significant difference in the sedentary activities of playing with car toy (p=0,021) to the EG and reading to the CG (p=0,001); in the physical activities the school physical education (p=0,001) and riding a bike (p=0,014) to the CG; b) the second one The Practice of Infant Games and Fun the children and teenagers with and without Epilepsy in this one the playing with marble presented significant difference (p=0,016) to the CG, despite the girls of the two groups don t do this activity. Observing the distribution of frequencies, it was verified that in the play catch-up and hide-and-seek and burn the EG plays more than the CG both in female and male gender. The girls of the EG play less skip, 60 while the boys of the two groups don t play. Elastic jump the girls of the two groups play in a same frequency and the boys don t participate of this fun. The seizures were found to occur during: soccer (23,3%); hide-and-seek (6,6%) and running (3,3%). In the sedentary activities, seizures were reported to occur: resting and watching TV (18,3%), sleeping (36,0%); sitting (13,3%) and lying down (11,7%). Our results showed that the epileptic group and the controls group engage in the same activities, although the epileptic group participates less than the controls. Although the EG had presented a bigger percentage of generalized attacks, they don t occur during the practice of formal physical activities. The research was developed by a multidisciplinary team, and this contributed a lot to the realization of this study

Relações trabalhistas e estilo de vida do atleta profissional de futebol do Rio Grande do Norte

Brazilian Law n° 9.615 of 24 March, 1998 established new paradigms in the employment relations existent between the soccer athlete and the sport association, both of whom are accustomed to the former legislation. They do not seem to have organized themselves in the sense of understanding the practical effects of the legal precepts currently in force, raising doubts that hinder the professional practice of the former and the performance of the latter in relation to managing these human resources. The purpose of this study is to analyze the degree of knowledge displayed by the professional soccer athlete about the legal recourses at his disposal in relation to the employment relations established in his work contract, as well as investigating the stress habits and stress situations that he most often experiences. This descriptive study consisted of a sample of 105 players under contract with clubs participating in the final phase of the state soccer championship. A questionnaire was used as the data collection instrument, whose analysis allows us to verify the lack of knowledge, on the part of the subjects studied, about the laws that regulate their profession, as well as identifying the stress habits and stress situations that are most reflected in their lifestyle. The lack of knowedge of regulate norms of their profession influences, in a negative way, in the lifestyle of soccer professional athlete from Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil

Conhecimentos sobre o corpo: uma possibilidade de intervenção pedagógica nas aulas de educação física no ensino médio

The following study aims at the main conceptions around the body and the learning through physical education classes at school. Therefore, this research mainly presents a proposal of pedagogical intervention on physical education for Ensino Médio, centered on the knowledge about the body as well as how to evaluate the impacts of such interventions on the students‟ learning process. In order to surround our field of investigation, this work elaborates the following study questions: a) What have students learned about the body in physical education classes in Ensino Médio at IFRN? b) What methodological possibilities can contribute on the experience of meaningful learning processes in physical education in Ensino Médio related to the knowledge of body aspects? Regarding to the methodology used, this ethnographic research used several instruments for data collecting like dairies, diagnostic activities, self-assessment evaluations, portfolio, filming, photographs and posts on the social network facebook. The materialization of the pedagogical intervention and all of its implications allow us to consider that the physical education classes in Ensino Médio at IFRN, campus Parnamirim have supported meaningful experiences of learning. Also they motivate relevant discussions applicable to the students‟ everyday lives once they are supported by discussions related to the influence of media about the body of teenagers, the irregular use of steroids, massaging as a possibility of body relaxation. Also, we point out that the students had the chance to experience body activities which crossed the limits of physical education classes‟ hegemony at school, such as indoor soccer, dodgeball, volleyball, basketball and handball. Thus, the students could experience body activities beyond the limits of most common sports, which started several discussions about the juvenile universe and culture. Beside the professional and personal importance of this work, we list the scientific relevance for the production of knowledge on the educational field once the number of Works about the knowledge of the body are still only a few. This study is mainly about alternative body practices. Therefore, we consider that the knowledge about the body can and must be studied not only through alternative practices, but also in different approaches which can be attributed to body running phenomenon. Finally, we believe that the discussions hereby motivated about the matter are far from being enough, so we deliver our intention in deepening this study on forthcoming researches about the knowledge of the body in the field of physical education in Ensino Médio

RoboEduc: uma metodologia de aprendizado com robótica educacional

In this work, we propose a methodology for teaching robotics in elementary schools, based on the socio-historical Vygotsky theory. This methodology in conjunction with the Lego Mindstoms kit (R) and an educational software (an interface for control and programming of prototypes) are part of an educational robotics system named RoboEduc. For the practical development of this work, we have used the action-research strategy, being realized robotics activities with participation of children with age between 8 and 10 years, students of the elementary school level of Municipal School Ascendino de Almeida. This school is located at the city zone of Pitimbu, at the periphery of Natal, in Rio Grande do Norte state. The activities have focused on understanding the construction of robotic prototypes, their programming and control. At constructing prototypes, children develop zone of proximal development (ZPDs) that are learning spaces that, when well used, allow the construction not only of scientific concepts by the individuals but also of abilities and capabilities that are important for the social and cultural interactiond of each one and of the group. With the development of these practical workshops, it was possible to analyse the use of the Robot as the mediator element of the teaching-learning process and the contributions that the use of robotics may bring to teaching since elementary levels

Controle adaptativo robusto para um modelo desacoplado de um robô móvel

This thesis presents a new structure of robust adaptive controller applied to mobile robots (surface mobile robot) with nonholonomic constraints. It acts in the dynamics and kinematics of the robot, and it is split in two distinct parts. The first part controls the robot dynamics, using variable structure model reference adaptive controllers. The second part controls the robot kinematics, using a position controller, whose objective is to make the robot to reach any point in the cartesian plan. The kinematic controller is based only on information about the robot configuration. A decoupling method is adopted to transform the linear model of the mobile robot, a multiple-input multiple-output system, into two decoupled single-input single-output systems, thus reducing the complexity of designing the controller for the mobile robot. After that, a variable structure model reference adaptive controller is applied to each one of the resulting systems. One of such controllers will be responsible for the robot position and the other for the leading angle, using reference signals generated by the position controller. To validate the proposed structure, some simulated and experimental results using differential drive mobile robots of a robot soccer kit are presented. The simulator uses the main characteristics of real physical system as noise and non-linearities such as deadzone and saturation. The experimental results were obtained through an C++ program applied to the robot soccer kit of Microrobot team at the LACI/UFRN. The simulated and experimental results are presented and discussed at the end of the text

Localização e planejamento de caminhos para um robô humanóide e um robô escravo com rodas

This work presents the localization and path planning systems for two robots: a non-instrumented humanoid and a slave wheeled robot. The localization of wheeled robot is made using odometry information and landmark detection. These informations are fused using a Extended Kalman Filter. The relative position of humanoid is acquired fusing (using another Kalman Filter) the wheeled robot pose with the characteristics of the landmark on the back of humanoid. Knowing the wheeled robot position and the humanoid relative position in relation to it, we acquired the absolute position of humanoid. The path planning system was developed to provide the cooperative movement of the two robots,incorporating the visibility restrictions of the robotic system

Infra-estrutura para avaliação e testes de protocolos sociais de comunicação em ambientes tridimencionais compartilhados

The advent of the Internet stimulated the appearance of several services. An example is the communication ones present in the users day-by-day. Services as chat and e-mail reach an increasing number of users. This fact is turning the Net a powerful communication medium. The following work explores the use of communication conventional services into the Net infrastructure. We introduce the concept of communication social protocols applied to a shared virtual environment. We argue that communication tools have to be adapted to the Internet potentialities. To do that, we approach some theories of the Communication area and its applicability in a virtual environment context. We define multi-agent architecture to support the offer of these services, as well as, a software and hardware platform to support the accomplishment of experiments using Mixed Reality. Finally, we present the obtained results, experiments and products

Mapeamento robótico 2,5-D com representação em grade de ocupação-elevação

This work introduces a new method for environment mapping with three-dimensional information from visual information for robotic accurate navigation. Many approaches of 3D mapping using occupancy grid typically requires high computacional effort to both build and store the map. We introduce an 2.5-D occupancy-elevation grid mapping, which is a discrete mapping approach, where each cell stores the occupancy probability, the height of the terrain at current place in the environment and the variance of this height. This 2.5-dimensional representation allows that a mobile robot to know whether a place in the environment is occupied by an obstacle and the height of this obstacle, thus, it can decide if is possible to traverse the obstacle. Sensorial informations necessary to construct the map is provided by a stereo vision system, which has been modeled with a robust probabilistic approach, considering the noise present in the stereo processing. The resulting maps favors the execution of tasks like decision making in the autonomous navigation, exploration, localization and path planning. Experiments carried out with a real mobile robots demonstrates that this proposed approach yields useful maps for robot autonomous navigation

Navegação cooperativa de um robô humanóide e um robô com rodas usando informação visual

This work presents a cooperative navigation systemof a humanoid robot and a wheeled robot using visual information, aiming to navigate the non-instrumented humanoid robot using information obtained from the instrumented wheeled robot. Despite the humanoid not having sensors to its navigation, it can be remotely controlled by infra-red signals. Thus, the wheeled robot can control the humanoid positioning itself behind him and, through visual information, find it and navigate it. The location of the wheeled robot is obtained merging information from odometers and from landmarks detection, using the Extended Kalman Filter. The marks are visually detected, and their features are extracted by image processing. Parameters obtained by image processing are directly used in the Extended Kalman Filter. Thus, while the wheeled robot locates and navigates the humanoid, it also simultaneously calculates its own location and maps the environment (SLAM). The navigation is done through heuristic algorithms based on errors between the actual and desired pose for each robot. The main contribution of this work was the implementation of a cooperative navigation system for two robots based on visual information, which can be extended to other robotic applications, as the ability to control robots without interfering on its hardware, or attaching communication devices

Plataforma Robótica de Baixíssimo Custo para Robótica Educacional

Robots are present each time more on several areas of our society, however they are still considered expensive equipments that are restricted to few people. This work con- sists on the development of control techniques and architectures that make possible the construction and programming of low cost robots with low programming and building complexity. One key aspect of the proposed architecture is the use of audio interfaces to control actuators and read sensors, thus allowing the usage of any device that can produce sounds as a control unit of a robot. The work also includes the development of web ba- sed programming environments that allow the usage of computers or mobile phones as control units of the robot, which can be remotely programmed and controlled. The work also includes possible applications of such low cost robotic platform, including mainly its educational usage, which was experimentally validated by teachers and students of seve- ral graduation courses. We also present an analysis of data obtained from interviews done with the students before and after the use of our platform, which confirms its acceptance as a teaching support tool

Odometria visual baseada em técnicas de structure from motion

Visual Odometry is the process that estimates camera position and orientation based solely on images and in features (projections of visual landmarks present in the scene) extraced from them. With the increasing advance of Computer Vision algorithms and computer processing power, the subarea known as Structure from Motion (SFM) started to supply mathematical tools composing localization systems for robotics and Augmented Reality applications, in contrast with its initial purpose of being used in inherently offline solutions aiming 3D reconstruction and image based modelling. In that way, this work proposes a pipeline to obtain relative position featuring a previously calibrated camera as positional sensor and based entirely on models and algorithms from SFM. Techniques usually applied in camera localization systems such as Kalman filters and particle filters are not used, making unnecessary additional information like probabilistic models for camera state transition. Experiments assessing both 3D reconstruction quality and camera position estimated by the system were performed, in which image sequences captured in reallistic scenarios were processed and compared to localization data gathered from a mobile robotic platform